One of our clients is in the health niche and was impacted by the May 2022 google update, specifically targeting websites for the lack of E-A-T (expertise/authority/trustworthiness).
Our client’s website saw a decrease in traffic by 31.57%.
We had a call with the client, discussed what we needed to do to recover the traffic, and laid out the plans for the following months.
After executing the plan, the website saw an increase in organic traffic by 64.95%, double what was lost.
The site is now growing stronger than ever.
In fact, as of right now, the website has reached a personal best for monthly organic traffic.
Here are the three steps that we took to optimize E-A-T.
1. “Author-izing” blog posts
The website had a lot of blog posts. While all these are quality content written by professionals, the design of the blog pages doesn’t have an author section.
This meant Google and users didn’t know who wrote the content even though professionals wrote it.
We needed to change that.
We included a small section that says who wrote the content and who reviewed it. This shows that the content has depth in terms of authority, making it more trustworthy for readers who are reading and consuming it.
Here’s an example of how authority sites are setting this up:
2. Enhancing author pages
There needed to be more than just making the blog post changes to showcase the website’s authority and expertise.
We also had to enhance the individual author pages. We broke down the optimization of the respective author pages into three sections.
The first is a section about the author’s experience and the second section is about the author’s education. The last section showcases the author’s branding. All the pages are also linked to their social profiles, such as LinkedIn and Facebook, depending on which one they have.
Here’s an example of how authority sites are setting this up:
3. Editorial Guidelines
We also wanted users to trust the content we are putting up on the website, especially because it’s in a health niche. The team already had an editorial process where the content was vetted and quality controlled by market experts.
However, we still needed to have that process written down on the website. So what we did was included an editorial process page that goes through how the content is being produced and stated the objective of the content.
Here’s an example of how authority sites are setting this up:
Results
The results?
Traffic went from 10,000 per month to 16,000 per month (around a 65% increase) and still climbing. The traffic value is worth over $12,300.
